The POS has been attacked, and is sitting in reinforced. Somebody said they have a plan?

As it so often happens, the full story is slightly more complex, but only slightly. While pulling some ore from one of our remaining grav sites, a couple of our miners had gotten surprised by a handful of hostiles. Both were melted pretty quickly and sent packing back to empire by way of a swift podding. The band of hostiles, who had entered the system though a new K162, proceeded then to our POS and after about 3 hours, sent it into reinforced mode.

Getting two pilots killed certainly left us down in terms of raw staff manning the WH, and at present I’m certainly not flying anything with firepower enough to repel anything save a starter frigate. We had no real eyes on the system, although the senior pilots had moved some of their ships to safe areas and logged the characters off. Blake and I, both still at work, started to muse about our possibilities via gChat. We decided that there were only a handful of viable scenarios.

Well, it certainly has been an interesting couple of weeks for me in regards to online gaming.

Ahem, right. First things first. My name is JB, and I am a recent transplant into our humble corporation. To continue:

Yeah, that's the stuff.

I was, in the past, a huge PC gamer. I’m going to unfortunately date myself somewhat here, but my gaming beginnings as a kid (on the PC anyway, my console beginnings were on the old Atari 2600) were back in the Doom era, which I ran (a relative term) on a 33Mhz 486SX with a 4Mb RAM upgrade. It came with 2Mb. And I believe a 54Mb hard drive that chattered like a pair of wind up teeth when in use. A lovely 5.25″ drive (for which disks seemed to always be corrupt) and a 3.5″ drive rounded out the presentation, along with a blaring (certainly not blazing) 2800 baud modem and Prodigy pre-installed. Did I mention it was a Packard Bell?

I’ve always had an affinity for the science fiction genre, both in and outside of gaming. StarControl II was an obsession early on, moving to X-Wing, then TIE Fighter, Privateer, Wing Commander, and finally Freespace, where the spaceship-shooting-an-invading-force-in-the-face-repeatedly genre seemed to die. There, of course, has been Egosoft’s X series, with its fun(?) interface as well as hours and hours of repeated poor battle mechanics. But, as I’ve aged, I have, like the opposite of any good cheese, gotten mellower. The concept of a game where I could hop on for a few hours, do something that felt like useful progress, hop off, and not be too terribly concerned with it appealed to me. So, last year I tried EVE. Read the rest of this entry »